Love’s Wounds examines the familiar figure of the suffering poet-lover in Petrarch’s Canzoniere and in four lyric collections that derive directly from it: Scève’s Délie, Du Bellay’s Olive, d’Aubigné’s Hécatombe à Diane, and Spenser’s Amoretti. Successive chapters devoted to each of these collections trace the gradual ratchetting up of the Petrarchan paradigm on three separate but related levels: the poet’s abjectness, the severity of the wounds he suffers, and, most crucially, the cruelty of his beloved lady. Underpinning the entire discussion is the original and somewhat counterintuitive argument that the trope of the poet’s suffering is in fact a rhetorical strategy that both guarantees the legitimacy and authenticity of his speech, and grants him agency and license to speak freely and frankly of the injustice done to him—that is, to practice a rhetoric of licentia, or parrhesia. The paradoxical result is an indomitable, “unstoppable” voice that, though rooted in abject impotence, effectively speaks truth to power. Nazarian calls this phenomenon “counter-sovereignty” and considers its political ramifications in each of the lyric collections in question.

The progression traced in these chapters is undeniable and well observed—from Petrarch’s sighs and tears to d’Aubigné’s gory wounds incurred in war, martyrdom, and pagan sacrifice, for example, and from the ethereal and saintly Laura to the sadistic Scythotaurian goddess Diane. Equally undeniable is the political, or at the least the cultural, purpose that subtends many lyric collections in the Petrarchan tradition. This is perhaps clearest in the case of Du Bellay, whose Deffense et illustration de la langue françoise states explicitly the nationalistic program that lies behind the Olive, offered as a direct challenge to the cultural dominance of Italy and the political hegemony of the Holy Roman Empire. Nazarian makes a good case for Petrarch also, arguing plausibly that the political poems of the Canzoniere are not outliers but natural counterparts to the love poems, and that both are integral to a single, coherent project. Less clear is precisely how the counter-sovereignty of these lyric collections might actually function in relation to concrete political realities of the day, and precisely what political meaning it might convey. Should the Olive be read as an allegorical polemic against Charles V, figured by the cruel and tyrannical Olive? Nazarian does not make such a claim, but neither does she say just how far in this direction we are meant to go. Vague terms like “political critique” and “resistance” are too often used in a disconcertingly absolute sense, suggesting many possibilities without explicitly stating any.

The chapters on d’Aubigné and Spenser are somewhat clearer in this regard because the lyric collections in these cases are so intimately related to epic poems whose political ideologies are more apparent. In the case of Spenser, especially, Nazarian points to textual and situational analogies between the Amoretti and the Faerie Queene that support her reading of the latter as an apology for “devolutionary monarchy.” But the focus of these chapters shifts too much to the narrative works, away from the lyric. This is especially true of the chapter on d’Aubigné, where an excellent opportunity to interpret the poet’s wounds and Diane’s cruelty in the Hécatombe as true political and religious allegory slips away. D’Aubigné’s Diane is after all a Catholic, which is to say, from a Protestant point of view, a pagan. Erotic suffering that is explicitly represented as idolatry (Catholic) and as human sacrifice (pagan), and at the same time as martyrdom (Protestant), would seem to attach specific political and theological meanings (treason? apostasy?) to what Petrarch benignly called a giovenile errore, suggesting that the poems might fruitfully be analyzed in far greater detail as particularly pointed examples of “counter-sovereign critique.”

Though it leaves many of its own questions unanswered, Nazarian’s study has the great merit of proposing a thought-provoking new way of understanding the rhetoric of Petrarchan lyric, and of assaying the heuristic value of a bold and clearly articulated thesis. The book concludes unexpectedly but helpfully with a discussion of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis and Rape of Lucrece, convincingly interpreted as counterexamples of counter-sovereignty, which throw into even sharper relief the central concept of the book.